20 great movies from the past 20 years: Jigarthanda DoubleX

I’m counting down to my 2025 best-of-the-year picks by recommending 20 of my favorite movies from the past 20 years. Here are the previous entries, if you want to catch up:

2005: Caché
2006: Undisputed II: Last Man Standing
2007: Sunshine
2008: Speed Racer
2009: Vengeance
2010: Unstoppable
2011: The Three Musketeers
2012: Eega
2013: Rope A Dope
2014: Hill of Freedom
2015: SPL 2: A Time for Consequences
2016: Love & Friendship
2017: Mersal
2018: Infinite Football
2019: Dark Waters
2020: Riders of Justice
2021: The Mushroom Speaks
2022: Hundreds of Beavers

Movies about the Power of Cinema™ can be self-important, saccharine, and worst of all, boring. Jigarthanda DoubleX is none of those things: the sprawling period action drama is a thrilling tale of gangsters, movie stars, politicians, and the people caught between them.

Director Karthik Subbaraj started his career as a contestant on the reality show Naalaiya Iyakkunar, where prospective filmmakers made seven short films in seven different genres. (Side note: What a fantastic idea, I would like to greenlight new versions of this across the globe). That background shows in Subbaraj’s varied output influences, as well as his skill at shifting tones or genres within a piece. Jigarthanda DoubleX is my favorite of his, but his latest movie Retro (also on Netflix) is another highly entertaining genre blend that is well worth checking out for fans of his style.

In Jigarthanda DoubleX, it’s the 1970s, and a coward who believes it’s his destiny to become a cop gets framed for a quadruple murder. He gets released from prison by a corrupt movie star/politician, on the condition that he kills one of the lieutenants of that movie star/politician’s rival. Naturally, our coward poses as a movie director, because his target (a notorious gangster who loves Clint Eastwood) has made it his new mission in life to be the first dark-skinned movie star in India. While making their silly movie (a biopic of the gangster, of course), they fall in love with the magic of cinema and its transformative power on a personal and societal level.

Jigarthanda DoubleX fires on all cylinders throughout its nearly three-hour run time, with superb direction, complex characters fully embodied by terrific actors, thrilling action sequences, funny gags, and a surprising amount of emotional depth. It’s a distillation of Subbaraj’s many influences and skills, and that means there’s something for everyone in it.

Jigarthanda DoubleX is streaming on Netflix.